GOP-leaning blogger Soren Dayton deliberately misinterprets a series of out of context quotes from Sen. Obama in order to “prove” that Sen. Obama’s changing his tune. Dayton calls it: “Funny. That’s not what Obama used to say…” but the only thing that’s funny here is Dayton’s bizarro “logic”.

Dayton starts out by carping that Sen. Obama voted against the Kerry Amendment (which called for an immediate withdrawal of troops). In the quote Dayton pulled from Obama’s floor speech before that vote, the explanation is clear. Obama says (Dayton even bolds it for us):

I’m also acutely aware that a precipitous withdrawal of our troops, driven by Congressional edict rather than the realities on the ground, will not undo the mistakes made by this Administration. It could compound them.

It could compound them by plunging Iraq into an even deeper and, perhaps, irreparable crisis.

So clearly Obama voted against immediate, full withdrawal because to do so would have been “precipitous” and plunge Iraq into “an even deeper” crisis. Isn’t that (for different reasons) pretty much exactly what conservative partisans were also saying at the time?

But then Dayton picks up an Obama quote from just the other day (again, Dayton bolds it for us):

…my plan begins a phased withdrawal from Iraq on May 1st, 2007, with the goal of removing all combat troops by March 31st, 2008.

Note that this is not an immediate withdrawal — the “precipitous” withdrawal — that Obama voted against. It is, in Obama’s own words, a phased withdrawal.

Yet somehow, in Dayton’s bizarro world, it is. Does Dayton even realize his own self-contradiction right there in front of us? Or does he literally think Obama must always use the exact same words every time he talks about a subject? How boring.

Of course, Obama-hater and former Alan Keyes campaign worker Fran Eaton (now editor of Illinois Review) pimps this bad info by copying and linking to it. It’s the Obama-hating echo chamber at work…

Score one more point for deliberate misrepresentation and backwards partisanship. (Of course, it’s not the first time for Ms. Eaton, who routinely misrepresents issues she doesn’t like.)

Sidenote: It’s interesting to see that Dayton has a large ad for the cross-dressing Rudy Giuliani up.